What is Kalix?

Kalix from Lightbend is a Platform-as-a-Service that abstracts away the complexity of cloud-native backend development by managing all tasks associated with Kubernetes, database set-up and administration, security, compliance, integrations, and more, so developers can focus on building the business logic behind applications, not boilerplate code.

Profile

Kalix (@Kalix.io), by Lightbend is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enable organizations to build and deploy cloud-native microservices and APIs rapidly, and at the lowest possible cost. It provides an “out of the box” cloud native stack to increase developer velocity with minimal operations required. Kalix promises an advancement over the existing serverless model in abstracting complexity, as it provides a unifying application layer that pulls together the necessary pieces. This includes databases, message brokers, caches, service meshes, API gateways, blob storages, CDN networks, CI/CD products, etc. It exposes them into one single unified programming model and DX tailored for the cloud and edge. By abstracting away the complexity of the backend, teams can focus solely on building the business logic behind your apps, and any developer can code highly performant and scalable distributed systems to modernize and transform your business.

Focus

Kalix was designed to reduce the time it takes to build and deploy cloud-native applications, either for greenfield projects or for modernizing monolithic legacy apps. It simplifies the complexity of building resilient, scalable, and highly-performant microservices and APIs.

By allowing developers to code in their preferred languages and use their preferred tools, Kalix reduces the learning curve and enables quick-start proficiency for many developers.

Kalix is engineered to utilize a number of battle-hardened best practices and patterns automatically; best practices and patterns that make Kalix inherently scalable, reliable and efficient. It’s built and hardwired to run applications the right way.

These patterns and best practices are derived from over a dozen years of development and deployment of the core infrastructure that Kalix is built upon. Application developers are able to build applications completely naive to these patterns, but their benefits are inherently apparent when the application is deployed to the cloud.

Once your application is up and running, Kalix continues to manage backend operations for you. It scales up and down as needed to address even massive influxes of users without any code changes, which in turn saves precious time that can add up to significant cost savings — and optimized usage of your cloud resources.

Background

Kalix was released in May of 2022, is the newest solution developed and offered by Lightbend, and is the company’s first Platform as a Service. Over three years in the making, Kalix builds on the principles of Akka (a sophisticated platform for building self-managed frameworks and runtimes for back-end, real-time services, and APIs, used by some of the world’s most recognized brands). It enables developers to build distributed data and systems but removes the need to worry about underlying architecture complexity. With Kalix, Lightbend now offers a choice of solutions in support of organizations’ most business-critical initiatives.

Kalix main features

Cloud-native

Pre-integrated components for building and deploying highly performant and scalable cloud-native applications.

Managed backend operations

Kalix infers from your code how to best manage operations and does it for you, automatically.

Highly performant and ready to scale

Applications built on Kalix use self-healing principles of Reactive Architecture to ensure consistent reliability and resiliency; plus the ability to scale up and down as needed to accommodate massive influxes in users with no additional code required.